Google have just announced some changes relating to usage of their Google Maps API. We'll explain how this potentially impacts you and what your next steps should be. If you're interested in reading the full details of the announcement, you can find it here but in this article we'll be going through how this impacts our service for your reference.

In summary, on June 22, 2016 Google announced that they will start requiring that you use a Google API key when accessing any Google Maps related services and that you use this API key on your website. Before this announcement, the embed code that you use to install our store locator on your website did not need to use an API key.

The good news is that these API keys are free and permit up to 25,000 store locator loads a day.

Existing customers: Firstly, don't panic! Google have said that any existing websites using Google Maps will continue to work as before so your store locator will work just fine for now. However, Google have said that in future they plan to restrict all access to Google Maps services to API keys only. They haven't announced a date for this but it's reasonable to expect it will happen sometime later this year so we do recommend you grab a free API key and add it to your store locator. Here's our step by step guide of how to do this.

New customers: You're likely to need an API key unless you already had another store locator service or Google Map on your website's domain. As above, it's probably best to just get an API key as they are free and you prevent any possible future outages due to Google enforcing API key usage in future. Again, here's our step by step guide of how to do this.

That's all folks... for more information feel free to reach out to us via any of our support channels!